Mark Zuckerberg pushes rock band Muse off their Instagram handle shocking 2.7M followers
Your name is a big part of your social media identity, and that's exactly why Meta has forced a popular rock band to surrender the Instagram handle they possessed for over a decade.
Some people are willing to pay a lot of money to secure a unique and recognizable social media handle, and some creators have even shared their wild attempts to get their name attached to their account.
Muse – a rock band with over 2.7 million followers on Instagram – have unfortunately been left on the receiving end of that in a recent move by Mark Zuckerberg, as the musicians discovered that there's always going to be a bigger fish than you when the platform itself is involved.
While Meta wanted the impressive AI technology to take center stage with the announcement of its new agentic tool 'Muse', what people immediately discovered instead was that the account linked to the reveal had 'stolen' its name.
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Navigating to the '@muse' handle on Instagram now links you to the official account for Meta's new 'personal AI agent', with 123,000 followers and 25 posts already under its belt.
Comparatively, if fans of the rock band will now need to head to '@museband' for updates — although typing 'muse' into the search bar on Instagram does still give priority to the musicians, presumably because they have a following count that's nearly 22 times larger than the AI tool.
While it's not exactly the most consequential change to be implemented by Meta, and fans will still have no trouble whatsoever in finding the band on social media due to their established audience, many have still been left enraged by the news as a result.
"Mark Zuckerberg is such a loser," wrote one commenter on Reddit after the name switch was revealed, with another adding that they're "kinda triggered by this, I wanna say it's just a social media handle, but to me it screams 'we can do whatever we want, you own nothing, not even your name'."
It has also caused people to realise that social media isn't quite as public or personal as it might seem at face value. A third commenter argued that "it's crazy how a social media company just has carte blanche to decide what people can and cannot say or see on their platforms.
"If someone owned a physical space, like a town, they wouldn't have the right to control that, but in our increasingly digital world, they do have the right to do that in a digital space."
It's unclear whether an agreement was struck up prior to the change between Meta and Muse for the transition of this handle – as sometimes financial compensation is agreed in order to surrender the name – but neither party has made a statement on the matter.